Monthly Archives: May 2019

Review (x2): Confetti Cupcake & Chocolate Cupcake Pop-Tarts

Kellogg's Chocolate Cupcake Pop-Tarts Review Box

Look, I have a whipped cream firehose right here, and the safety’s off.
So I’m gonna ask you one more time: where’s Captain Cupcake?

It’s really the only explanation: the squiggle-stached mascot behind Hostess Cupcakes, known for his hulking naval circumference and nautical nonsense, hasn’t been seen in action for years. Many theorized that he, along with the other obscure sideshow snack cakes, were disappeared out of existence by the powerful Fruit Pie the Magician, whose grand illusion managed to rewrite our dark timeline and save Hostess from bankruptcy.

But with the release of these new conveniently frosted Chocolate Cupcake Pop-Tarts, the truth is clear. Captain Cupcake, bitter about his fudgy offspring not getting their own Hostess Cereal (this was C. Cupcake’s one chance to return fire against Cap’n Crunch!), defected and sold trade secrets to Kellogg’s. Now we can only assume that he’s hiding out in the molded wreckage of an abandoned Hostess Bakery Thrift Outlet.

If he happens to reappear under a new diet alias—with a slimmer shape due to months spent lifting stale Wonderbread pallets—I hope the feds book this “Admiral Aspartame” instantly.  Continue reading

Review: Kellogg’s HI! Happy Inside – Simply Strawberry

Kellogg's HI! Happy Inside Review Simply Strawberry Cereal Pouch

Oh, you thought cereal was for you and your taste buds? Nope, sorry buster: this cereal is specifically for your stomach. Your gut. Your food wallet. Whatever you call it, it better be ready for a healthy migration of gut flora, because Kellogg’s new HI! Happy Inside cereal line is here to culture abdomens everywhere.

We’ve been aware of HI! Happy Inside for a while now, but it was largely only available in location- or cost-prohibitive value packs. My local chains have finally begun to stock the stuff in smaller pouches, so I’m taking a cautious first spelunk into this protozoan belly of the beast with Simply Strawberry—ostensibly the fruity front-liner of this howdy-happy cereal trilogy that also includes Bold Blueberry and Cocoa Crunch.

I was hesitant to try this stuff to begin with, since, generally any healthy cereal that brands itself from head to intestine as an anatomical expedient ends up abandoning my appetite somewhere near the gall bladder. But as I wait for other new cereals that are less stomach-friendly and more gut-punchy, I figure it couldn’t hurt to brace my body for impact. Each HI! Happy Inside cereal boasts a three-in-one benefit of prebiotics, probiotics, and fiber, so even if I hate this stuff, maybe this review can still be cited for some kid’s science fair project. Continue reading

News: Kellogg’s Simply Pop-Tarts Harvest Strawberry

Kellogg's Simply Pop-Tarts Harvest Strawberry Box

How much time has to go by before a News post becomes an Overdue post?

At least I’m not alone: the existence of Harvest Strawberry-flavored “Simply” Pop-Tarts has apparently gone under the radar of every snack food journalist from the information super highway to the dusty backroads of the Wild Wildberry West.

And for good reason: the timeline behind these GMO-free Pop-Tarts is a little cloudy. Web searches reveal that they’ve been mentioned in early 2018, when it seems they were exclusive to school lunch programs, much like General Mills’ neufchatel-filled cereal bars. But I was able to date their current, Costco-exclusive 32-pack debut back to January of this year, thanks to a Kellogg’s newsletter for health and wellness professionals.

The irony here is that the nutrition facts for Simply Pop-Tarts are just as, if not more dietarily damning than a normal Strawberry Pop-Tart, with more saturated fat per pastry. But hey: at least it has half a gram more of dietary fiber and no green sprinkles!

No word on whether these will taste dramatically different than normal Strawberry Pop-Tarts—I expect to taste that harvest, whether it’s a touch of earthy dirt or the metallic sheen of an International Harvester combine—but without a Costco membership, I’ll ask that if you’ve tried them, leave a comment below. In the mean time, I’ll have to woo my grandma into xeroxing her membership card.

Or just try Google Express.

Spooned & Spotted: Cap’n Crunch’s Red, White & Blue Crunch

New Cap'n Crunch Red, White & Blue Crunch Cereal Box

For yet another boring Crunch Berry palette swap, this is still a juicy development for the Cap’n.

Close followers of Crunchian lore will remember a certain Freedom Crunch, a hyper-patriotic Cap’n variant that I discovered last summer and later redacted, after hearing from Cap’n Crunch that it was never actually produced. But then, I received word from Minnesota that the cereal demonstrably did reach at least one very select market (ironic for a nationally branded cereal). The truth of Freedom Crunch’s purgatorial existence has never been revealed—but hey, the stuff even has an officially licensed shirt! Continue reading